Her hands flew to her face again and tried to hide the dark blush.

“Mescal, there’s one question I wish you’d answer.  Does August Naab think he’ll make a Mormon of me?  Is that the secret of his wonderful kindness?”

“Of course he believes he’ll make a Mormon of you.  That’s his religion.  He’s felt that way over all the strangers who ever came out here.  But he’d be the same to them without his hopes.  I don’t know the secret of his kindness, but I think he loves everybody and everything.  And Jack, he’s so good.  I owe him all my life.  He would not let the Navajos take me; he raised me, kept me, taught me.  I can’t break my promise to him.  He’s been a father to me, and I love him.”

“I think I love him, too,” replied Hare, simply.

With an effort he left her at last and mounted the grassy slope and climbed high up among the tottering yellow crags; and there he battled with himself.  Whatever the charm of Mescal’s surrender, and the insistence of his love, stern hammer-strokes of fairness, duty, honor, beat into his brain his debt to the man who had saved him.  It was a long-drawn-out battle not to be won merely by saying right was right.  He loved Mescal, she loved him; and something born in him with his new health, with the breath of this sage and juniper forest, with the sight of purple canyons and silent beckoning desert, made him fiercely tenacious of all that life had come to mean for him.  He could not give her up—­and yet—­

Twilight forced Hare from his lofty retreat, and he trod his way campward, weary and jaded, but victorious over himself.  He thought he had renounced his hope of Mescal; he returned with a resolve to be true to August, and to himself; bitterness he would not allow himself to feel.  And yet he feared the rising in him of a new spirit akin to that of the desert itself, intractable and free.

“Well, Jack, we rode down the last of Silvermane’s band,” said August, at supper.  “The Navajos came up and helped us out.  To-morrow you’ll see some fun, when we start to break Silvermane.  As soon as that’s done I’ll go, leaving the Indians to bring the horses down when they’re broken.”

“Are you going to leave Silvermane with me?” asked Jack.

“Surely.  Why, in three days, if I don’t lose my guess, he’ll be like a lamb.  Those desert stallions can be made into the finest kind of saddle-horses.  I’ve seen one or two.  I want you to stay up here with the sheep.  You’re getting well, you’ll soon be a strapping big fellow.  Then when we drive the sheep down in the fall you can begin life on the cattle ranges, driving wild steers.  There’s where you’ll grow lean and hard, like an iron bar.  You’ll need that horse, too, my lad.”

“Why—­because he’s fast?” queried Jack, quickly answering to the implied suggestion.